One of the consequences of the international financial crisis has been a massive reduction in public funding for the arts in Europe. Numerous art institutions have been closed down or at least had to cut back their operations drastic ally. Portugal and Slovenia have even gone as far as to close their ministries of culture. Public investment in art as means of community-building is in danger of disappearing.

To some extent, the changes in Europe are echoing a development that began back in the 1980s. Back then, the close linkage between culture and the state was challenged from many angles. In line with the neoliberalism that became the dominant philosophy of the 1990s, the idea of a more productive collaboration between culture and commerce emerged. Art was no longer regarded as a good in itself to the extent that it had been, but also as a means to achieve other public policy goals. Art was a commodity that could be put to use.

With this edition, the Norwegian Art Yearbook brings to a close a three year exploration of instrumentalism and autonomy in art. In a Norwegian context, where the public sector plays such a crucial role in funding the arts, it was natural to take the public art institutions as a starting point. The two previous editions looked at how, and to what extent, instrumental attitudes have influenced the activities of Arts Council Norway and KORO (Public Art Norway). In this year’s book, we turn our attention from government subsidies to the market and the private economy.

The activities of commercial galleries and private art collectors, art investors, foundations and funds have been important for the ways in which art is produced and discussed, in Norway as elsewhere. But over the past few decades a number of new phenomena have emerged, such as private museums, art prizes sponsored by the com-mercial sector, and so-called “corporate collecting” – the preserve of private and semi-private initiatives with significant budgets and a professional interest in the ways art can contribute to a company’s reputation and strengthen its work environment. From the time of its opening in 1993, the Astrup Fearnley Museum has had a purchasing budget that no public museum could hope to match. This has been followed by a number of other corporate collections, financed by companies such as Storebrand, Telenor, Nordea and Norsk Hydro.

In this year’s book we present an interview with art dealer and gallery owner Peder Lund, who has played a role in the development of a number of corporate collections in Norway. In conversation with Kåre Bulie, Lund describes the development of his business from its inception through to the opening of his new gallery at Tjuvholmen.
The opening of the new Astrup Fearnley Museum was one of the most widely reported cultural events in Norway of the past year. But shortly after this Renzo Piano-designed venue opened its doors in September, it was revealed that one of the museum’s sponsors was Lundin Petroleum, a firm that is under investigation for violations of international law for its operations in Sudan during the oil conflict of 1997–2003. Their involvement, which obviously amounts to an ugly blotch on the museum’s image, triggered protests in the art world. The Statoil Art Award is another initiative that has met with negative reactions and boycotts among artists, both on a general basis and in protest at the company’s involvement in oil extraction from Canada’s tar sands and oil exploration in the Arctic.

Those accustomed to the “Norwegian model” have shown themselves to be outspokenly sceptical towards the private sector as a source of funding for arts and culture. This is due in part to the fact that people in the business world tend to be more explicit about what they expect in return for their support and in addressing questions relating to the ways they earn their money. Another factor is Norway’s status as a relatively egalitarian country where to a large extent people identify with the state; here there has been wide spread agreement that culture is an asset that has to be shared, and that no one is better placed to manage its distribution than the state. And a third factor was the emergence of what one might call a corporate culture between the government and art organisations in the 1970s, when artists won significant influence in arts policymaking.

The situation today is perhaps more complex and characterised by greater realism. Art is not automatically amenable to large-scale public enlightenment projects, as some people thought it was in the 1950s. And what happens in the art world is not a question that should be decided by artists alone, which was the view held by many in the 1970s. But neither is art merely a commodity, as art investors some times seem to think. Today’s complex situation, in which public, private and semi-private interests all operate in parallel, has created new opportunities, but requires awareness of how different influences impact on the art that is produced and displayed.

We have invited three writers to look at various aspects of the art market, autonomy and instrumentalism. For many years now, the Canadian artist and critic Melanie Gilligan has been preoccupied with the relationship between art and the market from both theoretical and artistic standpoints. In her article “Art – autonomy – the market”, she explores how, since the turn of the new millennium, the international art market has come to be dominated by finance capital. Although the financial crisis has played havoc with the “lower” echelons of the market, the upper levels have remained largely unaffected, with art objects readily changing hands among wealthy investors seeking to diversify their investments.

Mikkel Bolt delves deeper into the issues surrounding art and capitalism in his text “Unfinished Business. Beyond art, culture and politics”. This essay offers a response to, among things, the British art historian Claire Bishop’s interpretation of the social turn in art, and the “over-politicisation” of art during the past decade. According to Bishop, these developments have tended to compromise art as an autonomous practice. In Bolt’s view, Bishop is forgetting that art is anti-capitalist in its very nature. Capitalism serves as a frame for art, but also as a limit which it constantly seeks to transcend. For Bolt, the role of art is to challenge its own autonomy from within, and in so doing, to challenge capitalist society as well.

In her article “On the autonomy of art”, Marit Grøtta applies a historical approach in order to discover the origins of the concept of autonomy in art. Grøtta places much of the blame for today’s controversies about the autonomy of art on the hegemony of modernism. She cites Niklas Luhmann as one theorist who presents a more positive approach to autonomy than that offered by modernist ideas of opposition and negation.

For its criticism section, this year’s Norwegian Art Yearbook has invited four writers from other fields to throw the light of their own disciplines on visual art by writing about an exhibition or work of their choice. Music critic Martin Bjørnersen reports on a concert/performance with musician and queer activist Terre Thaemlitz at the Ny Musikk in Oslo. The authors Cesilie Holck and Nils Øyvind Haagensen write about two different exhibitions: Holck visited Bjørn Hegardt and Theo Ågren’s installation at the Rake art space in Trondheim, while Haagensen decided to take a closer look at one of Rune Johansen’s photographs at Galleri K in Oslo. Writer Espen Stueland gets to grips, almost literally, with the material aspect of Damien Hirst’s now iconic sculpture Mother and Child Divided at the Astrup Fearnley Museum.

The cover for this year’s edition of the yearbook features the score of Vevnad (1993) by Arne Nordheim. This is intended as a homage, on the hand to Norway’s largest contribution ever to the latest edition of the prestigious Documenta exhibition in Kassel, and as a thank you to Marta Kuzma for her eight years as director of OCA (Office for Contemporary Art), a position she terminated this summer. As a member of Documenta’s curator group, Kuzma was instrumental in securing the Norwegian participation at last year’s event. Nordheim’s work was performed in front of six of Hannah Ryggen’s tapestries at the very heart of the exhibition, in the rotunda of the Kunsthalle Fridericianum.